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“If you were an authoritarian seeking to influence another head of state, you might offer him a luxuriously appointed Boeing 747 airplane. You might spend big at his hotels or invest in one of the many companies owned by him and his children. You might buy his sneakers, NFTs and other branded products. In the case of President Trump, a potential influence peddler has a vast menu of choices.

But why bother with all that? While campaigning, Mr. Trump announced his cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial, and, just days before inauguration, his namesake memecoin. Anyone can indirectly deliver money to a Trump family entity simply by buying World Liberty’s tokens. Mr. Trump and his family have accrued billions of dollars in paper wealth through crypto ventures owned by the president, his sons and family friends.

With World Liberty, Trump has created a powerful vehicle for those seeking influence. Anyone — you, me, an Emirati prince — can put money in his pocket by simply buying the tokens the company issues. The key is the convenience factor. For influence peddlers, bags of cash and Swiss bank accounts have been replaced by crypto tokens that can be quickly shuttled between digital wallets and cryptocurrency exchanges. Savvier crypto users — nation-states, hacker groups, money launderers — can use digital “mixers” and other tools to obfuscate their trail.

It’s precisely these conveniences that have also made crypto a favored tool of criminal organizations and sanctions evaders.
We’ve never seen anything like this before. You can tick off notorious executive branch scandals — President Ulysses S. Grant’s rogues’ gallery of corrupt advisers, Teapot Dome’s bribes for oil leases in the Harding administration, Watergate and the downfall of Richard Nixon — but none of them featured this scale of mixing of personal and government interests, much less the sheer accumulation of profit, of Mr. Trump’s multibillion-dollar crypto windfall.

There’s little innovation at work here, except the bold use of the sitting president’s name, image and social media presence to promote crypto products that are little different than thousands of others in the volatile, fraud-riddled crypto markets. For MAGA fans and everyday speculators, buying these tokens might lead to them losing their shirts. And certainly, a president roping his political supporters into an investment as risky as crypto is condemnable.

But the larger risk concerns Mr. Trump and the huge amount of money that powerful overseas actors can potentially funnel toward him. If you are a head of state, it is in your direct political interest to buy Mr. Trump’s tokens or invest in one of his crypto ventures.


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